Archiv der Kategorie: mobile telephony

It seems that the parts of the source code of Apple’s iOS 9 have leaked via github. They might have been removed from there, while you are reading this, but probably they will be passed around in the internet anyway.

Some sources say that this is a risk to security. It might be, but in the end cryptography specialists tend to consider the availability of the source code as an advantage for security, because it can be analyzed by everyone, vulnerabilities can be found and published and of course more easily be corrected if the source is available to everyone. Hiding the source code is some kind of „security by obfuscation“, which is not really a strong mechanism and it should be based on verifiable secure mechanisms, as successfully applied by Linux and other open source operating systems. But this might not be fully true, if the sources are just passed around in somewhat closed circles and not easily available to the general public.

This does not make iOS open source, because the licenses that Apple imposes on their software are still valid and to my understanding they do not make this part of the system open source, which means much more than just being able to read the source code of a certain version that might already be outdated. Please observe that if the source code that you might find on github is really coming from Apple, their original license and not the one mentioned in github applies.

To put Jail breaking somewhere near security breaches is wrong, because this is an action done by the owner of the device with his or her own device at own risk. This should be everyone’s right to do so and there should be nothing wrong with making it easier. I know, we are not living in a perfect world…

So please relax. If Apple has done a good job, there will not be too bad exploits and if they are still doing a good job, they will quickly fix any exploits that show up. And if you like to have an open source system, you should still consider using something else.

Some may have noticed, some not, but the landline telephony is actually being shut down in the next few years, if it has not happened already. This is done in Germany and in Switzerland and I assume other countries will follow or even do it earlier. In some countries and in some age groups the landline telephone does not exist any more. Younger people have only the cell phone and use flat rates for mobile telephony or VoIP services on the cell phone to call. And actually asynchronous communication mechanisms like email and messaging are more popular now than actually talking on the phone. So the technology that is relevant for phone companies now is internet and mobile telephony. So it is a logical step to stop supporting what has become an expensive niche technology. It looked like phone companies wanted customers to actually move their infrastructure to VoIP. That means the black phone with the dialing wheel from the 1950s would no longer work and customers would have to buy new devices, which would eventually allow them to make calls like before, just using keys instead of the dialing wheel. Or it would even be necessary to buy a computer or a tablet or a smart phone to do telephony at all. It seems that this approach was too ambitious, because there is a large group of customers who are unwilling or unable to move in this direction or simply unwilling to invest a lot of time on changing their habit and learning how to use the VoIP and a lot of money on buying devices that they actually do not want.

So the challenge is now to provided adapters that support all historical phone technology and map that to VoIP without forcing the customer to get used to a new device or a new method of using it. There are some impacts that can probably not be avoided. The adapter needs electricity, while the phone got its own electricity from the landline and even worked when there was an outage of electricity. The adapter can be small, but it will need some space. And there will be patterns of how making a call can fail that did not exist before. More components are involved and all of them can fail. As fall back for emergency calls even when electricity has failed we will have to rely on cell phones. Hopefully their batteries are charged, but people get used to that. And really almost everyone has a cell phone, even in poorer countries. Or at least a neighbor with a cell phone.

If this approach succeeds that will be quite impressive. But probably it is the only reasonable way to do that. And supporting only one technology, which is internet, is cost efficient. So the question who should pay for the adapters has to be answered in each country where this transition is being made.

Btw., I think that television is also a technology that will disappear. While in the old days half a dozen TV stations where on the air and in some countries financed by fees or by advertising or by taxes, we got alternative access via cable, satellite dishes and now the internet. So the local fee-financed TV stations are getting less relevant, because we can watch content from all over the world. So instead of imposing the fees on everybody who dares to live in the country (like in Germany or Switzerland) it is time to either abolish the TV-fees or to cut them way down or to constrain them to those who actually register as users of the national TV stations. So the national TV stations could make their content available in the internet only to those who pay and generate revenue like that. And of course compete with others all over the world who can do the same, if they just manage to provide content in a language that is comfortably understood. As long as the internet is open and we can view content from other countries without censorship this is a great progress against the national TV, even if that disappears due to the lack of funding and the lack of efficiency.

It seems that Microsoft is ending the development of Windows Mobile. After having tried with some effort to get into the mobile operating system business, it seems that the market share is now less than 1%, with Android being >85% and iOS close to 15% according to IDC. Because the market is so large, it would be possible to run a profitable business even with a low market share, but this is probably hard for a big company and it seems more attractive to concentrate on other areas. It is good to have some good mobile apps available for the platform and that is an area where Android and iOS shine, while doing a third app for Windows phone is a bit unusual. A funny detail is that a retired guy, who was once the founder of Microsoft and who is still associated with that company by some people uses an Android phone for himself. But he is retired, so that is no longer too important.

The story is a bit weird, though… In 2010 Stephen Elop became the boss of Nokia. At this time Nokia had a market share of around 50% in mobile phones covering a wide range from tiny „non-smart“ phone to high end smart phones. They were mostly using Symbian as OS, but the transition to Maemo and MeeGo, like Android Linux variants, was on a good way and it would have been worth seeing where this might go. At this time it was already quite clear that MS Windows phone/Windows mobile was a failure. All efforts concerning Linux-based systems were stopped and Symbian was announced as being a dead end and the strategy was to move to MS-Windows phone only. Most likely this was done because Stephen Elop had more loyalty to Microsoft than to the company that he was running. To my knowledge this never became a case for the courts, but one might assume some criminal energy behind this. And some stupidity of the stock holders, who selected this person as CEO. Some time later the mobile phone branch of Nokia went down and was bought for very little money by Microsoft. After that acquisition it was further downsized and will probably go to zero soon, because Microsoft does not have interest to develop new hardware.

As it seems, there are mobile phones with the brand „Nokia“ again. HMD, a company in Finland designs them, pays to the company Nokia some money to use their brand. And of course they use Android.

It seems that the issue of having to write a mobile app twice because of Android and iOS has become a bit less pressing. Besided mobile web applications that can pretty much behave as rich clients through modern JavaScript frameworks, there are „fake apps“ that are actually pretty much browsers without a visible URL bar and programmed to only surf their home site. And even native apps are now increasingly being developed in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, which seem to be quite similar, at least at a conceptional level.

The Swisscom-App iO will be discontinued on 2017-08-31. So from then on the service will no longer be available. A bit more than four years after launching the app, it is now terminated. The goal was to replace a significant part of the conventional telephony by iO and to become a relevant player in the field with competitors like WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook-Messenger, Google-Hangouts, Threema, Skype etc.

Advantages of iO were:

The possibility to do „breakout-calls“, which means calling regular phone numbers from iO

The idea of tablet computers is actually quite old and it has been tried a couple of times, at least up to prototypes. Probably a certain level of hardware and software was needed to make them both useful and affordable for enough people to become a mass product. This is actually a quite common thing. Some person, group or company has invented something really good, but they were not able to provide a sufficiently reliable, useful and affordable product to the market or just were not able to leave their home market efficiently. There are just a few examples for this, that I have observed.

Tilting trains have been tried in Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Canada, France and Japan, in some countries several times. Many efforts become dead ends because the technology was not easily built in an affordable and reliable and maintainable way, so the mechanism was disabled or the trains were put out of service way too early. Italy actually made this technology work, but some of the train sets suffered serious deficiencies in quality, reliability and maintenance. Spain did the Talgo, which is less ambitious, because it uses gravity instead of an active mechanism and provides for a weaker effect. Sweden developed the X2000 trains, which seemed to work more or less well, but were quite expensive. But finally it seems that companies are able to produce good trains with this technology, like the relatively new Swiss ICN-trains.

A British company had produced trailer bikes for children already in the 1930s. They have one wheel and are attached to a parent’s bike. These were hard to get and they were almost unknown, even though the idea is great. In the 1990s German companies started to adopt the concept and actually produce them in good quality and sell them internationally, which was off course easier than 60 years earlier. They are now a common concept.

In the 1970s many bicycles had three speed hub gears. Derailleur gears already existed, but they were hard to use and fragile. For steeper roads it was possible to use a larger sprocket and to be able to climb slopes at the expense of lacking higher gears for flat sections. A British company produced a 5 speed hub gear, but it was extremely difficult to get and the quality was so poor that it would be almost half of the time in repair for a more active cyclist. Today we see mature hub gears with more than ten gears, but the derailleur technology has also become mature enough for the main stream.

So there are several requirements to success.

Another interesting aspect is that the actual usage might become different than anticipated. I understand that the tablet computers where sold as a „better replacement“ for PCs and Laptops in certain areas. I do not think that this is reasonable. Having a keyboard and a larger screen is usually better and it makes sense to transport a small or even a larger laptop. I have often had an external keyboard on top of the laptop, when I could afford to transport it and anticipated a heavy use. The netbook was so small that it did not hurt to have it in the luggage, but it was eventually hard to expand the memory and to get a replacement. A relatively small laptop still serves the purpose when a real computer is needed, but luggage is constrained.

The tablet computer does have some features that make it worth having one on top of a good phone and different sizes of Laptops. I am using an Android tablet, which is the most common OS for tablets, but there are off course some others, which I do not know well enough to write about them.

It is easier to switch between keyboard types. I am using the Cyrillic keyboard a lot and the computer with which I am writing this text has two external keyboards attached. I can switch with a key sequence, but this approach has its limitations. Probably buying a Laptop in Russia and just knowing the German keyboard without relying on the symbols on the keys would work for me. But the tablet makes this work with very little setup, while buying a physical Cyrillic keyboard in Switzerland is a bit harder, but still easy and buying a Laptop with Cyrillic keyboard layout does need some effort.

When doing small stuff, mostly reading or even some smaller emails, this is much better than the phone, but it can be used in the train, in the park, anywhere, where it is possible to sit. A laptop requires some kind of a table to be reasonably useful. There are seats with tables in the train, but that is a matter of luck to get one.

Finally we currently have a lot of Android Apps. They could be written for „normal“ desktop Linux as well or as web applications. Maybe that will happen. But currently some of them are available for Android, but not or not in a useful way for desktop Linux. This may change and it heavily depends on what we are actually using. But in my case it is true and it proved to be helpful to have the larger screen than on the Android phone.

Concerning the SIM card, I actually went the extra mile in terms of higher price and more effort for buying it in order to get a SIM card slot. I have not used it very much, because the extra SIM card is kind of expensive, moving SIM cards between devices is inconveniant and using the Android phone as a WiFi-Router seems to work well enough. But maybe this is useful when travelling a lot with SIM-cards from many countries to use just all the slots in older and newer phones and tablets and to use the device with the currently preferred SIM card as the WiFi router for all the others.

And finally it can be said that we can now buy fairly affordable good tablet computers. What I am missing is that tools from desktop Linux are usually not available on Android or only in a limited version. But the most common applications, a web browser and an email client are off course working on both…

Kurzmitteilung

The Finnische startup company Jolla, which has been founded by former Nokia emplyees, has shown a first version of its Meego based (and thus Linux based) cell phone operating system Sailfish. This happened on 2012-11-21.